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Design Sprint

What can we take from it?

If you are launching a new product or service, extending an existing experience to a new platform or looking for opportunities to improve your service or product, then check out how Design Sprint can help you through your journey.

Design Sprint is a process created by Jake Knapp at Google in 2010 taking inspiration from many places, including Google’s product development culture.

In a nutshell Design Sprint is a collaboration tool for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, user research and testing. It helps to improve on boarding experience, create a vision or a new product.

It is a process run by a “sprint master”. The Sprint master or facilitator is a person who will make sure all the metodology aspects are covered and followed in detail. He/she will intermediate discussions and drive the team to achieve results. For the Sprint process to work as it should, the team must be totally focused during the 4 or 5 days that it takes to complete the process. The results can be very impressive and fast if guidelines are strictly followed (see Sprints book link).

“The main benefits of this method are time saving and it also increases the validity of concepts because your are bringing together cross functional teams. Increase the sense of ownership and collaboration with the team. It is a shortcutting from idea to learn fast.“

Kai Haley

User Experience Designer

Sprint Master Academy Lead

Inside the SPRINT stages

The way you/ your business will aproach the Sprint methodology depends on what problem you are trying to solve or the business goals.

Usually this process of learning can take up to 5 days and follows the stages:

1) Understanding

2) Sketch

3) Decide

4) Prototype

5) Validate

It begins with the UNDERSTAND stage or day 1:

A day to build & share knowledge;

Map out the problem space;

Discover: the business opportunity, audience and the competition;

Define metrics of success;

People from different areas within the company (users, developers, designers, CEO, marketers) are invited to participate and share their point of view. This day is concluded with what success look like? How do we drive towards that success?

Next, the SKETCH stage or day 2:

Explore and develop creative ways of solving the problem.

Look at generate broad range of ideas and on the user journey.

This day concludes by narrowing down to the best idea. The group will sketch out what they think is the best solution for this problem, then take it into a design phase.

On the DECIDE stage or day 3:

Decide on prototype;

Identify ideas to bring into the next stage though storyboarding.

At the end of this stage the team already have an idea of what they want to prototype and then they move on to the prototype stage.

The PROTOTYPING stage or day 4:

Test concepts;

Design and prepare prototypes that can be tested with people.

At this stage it is really important to create the most useful and real experience in order to get the learnings the team are looking for.

The VALIDADE stage or day 5:

Conduct 1:1 user testing;

learn about the user experience;

What can we take from it? Design Sprint is an effective and innovative method of collaboration, problem solvingand design thinking. It is great for user validation and time saving. No two sprints are the same, it is a flexible framework, based on the goals and deliverables of the business or problem you are trying to solve.

Find out the ways you can make the most of this methodology and deep dive into Design Sprint to help your business succeed by developing products or services that users will really use.

To find out more about Design Sprint here some great sources of content: